Brightmail is yet to respond to our requests for comment on the issue but in the interests of fairness we note that its partnership with Hotmail aims to reduce - not eliminate - the amount of spam received by Hotmail users receive. This is reaching epidemic proportions.

According to Microsoft, there are 110m Hotmail users worldwide, which must mean billions of spams sent each day to Hotmail accounts. Here is an article from last year which suggests some reasons why Hotmail users get so much spam. ®